Obituary

by Jessica Lafortune

She told me once that she wanted to be a teacher, and that she wished she had gone to college. By default, she became a banker, the kind that sat for hours and painstakingly guided little old ladies in the process of balancing their checkbooks, rejoicing in the finding of a few elusive cents. She was a mother, the kind that cooked chicken a hundred different ways in casseroles with Campbell’s Soup recipes, the labels neatly taped to index cards. She was a wife, the kind who stayed for forty-nine years while he spent Saturdays with the woman whose car was seen parked next to his at the motel on the county line. “I should have left him years ago,” she told me once, after she’d had a few. She was a drinker, but there was never enough Canadian Club, and she died with her memory intact, survived by her husband, her children, her regret.

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Jessica Lafortune is a teacher, tutor, and freelance writer. She lives in Florida surrounded by humans and canines who (barely) tolerate her obsessive reading and writing habits.